Image enhancement is a method where a high resolution image is constructed from a low resolution image to produce an image which has been magnified to some degree. Prior art methods involve using an interpolation technique to fill in areas of the image where no data exists. However, the quality of the magnified image is inherently limited because, as the magnification factor increases, image detail degrades as larger areas of missing data in the image need to be generated. For video, the problem requires not only magnifying each frame of the video in the x, y direction, but also magnifying the video to increase the frame rate of the video sequence such that the video is enhanced both spatially and temporally.
Accordingly, what is needed in this art is a sophisticated video processing system and method which receives a lower resolution, lower frame rate video and processes that video to generate a higher resolution, higher frame rate video as output while minimizing image degradation.